


Signs

by ticoyuu



Series: the m in multiverse stands for mecha (original) [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Death, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Mecha, POV Second Person, Science Fiction, hurt a little comfort???maybe?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 16:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21832300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ticoyuu/pseuds/ticoyuu
Summary: swan song
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: the m in multiverse stands for mecha (original) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1573129





	Signs

**Author's Note:**

> hahahaha im so sorry kiva//  
this is kind of(?) an actually written excerpt from mech.analogia's timeline
> 
> i love 2nd person pov let me live KDJDJDJSJ

A soldier has to know his own body, and you know right when it starts that the signs are there.

One day you wake up and stretch in bed like always, but something catches in your spine that makes you wince and catch yourself, jaw clamped down against the whimper.

Sitting on the other bunk, Ein pulls his shirt over his head and gives you a glance, to which you throw on a sheepish smile and in a measuredly calm, measuredly flustered (the leader cannot allow anything to shake the team) voice, firmly tell him you just slept on your neck the wrong way, or something. Measuredly hesitant, in a way it sounds natural.

Ein’s gaze lingers, sharpening imperceptibly, but he shrugs and leaves to wake the newly arrived twins, just now learning to be living humans, at age twenty. It makes you a little bitter and you release your mask once he’s gone— the leader cannot allow anything to shake the team, especially not himself— but the third generation cryo twins, who have a full twenty years at least before their bodies even begin aging, degrading, regenerating, living; you can’t help the natural human urge to want what you can’t have. The twins have two decades of catchup but you; you are that long overdue and at least seventy years before your time.

——

On another occasion half a year later, the four of you (a family of toy soldiers, knocked around like a children’s game) escape a near brush with death and begin retraining. Every night you sleep dreamless, exhausted by the mental and physical demands of forcing a sync with the living Er Raian mechs that biologically— naturally— are incompatible with humans. For the other three, every bit of pain in training bolsters their survival chances. For you, your expiring body screams to conserve energy (it instinctively tries to prolong your shrinking lifespan), but the leader cannot allow anything to shake the team, so you hide your weakness and press your hands into your hips to hide the tremors and tell them enough, a day’s work is well done.

Every night Ein and the twins sleep dreamless— you’ve since downsized to a single large room; Ram and Ren huddle indistinct and stone-still on the second bunk and Ein sleeps curled into your side with his back to you. The smooth planes of his back press against yours (you feel his muscles flex as he shifts and sighs in sleep) and you’re glad he faces away, because the warmth of his body (responding, coursing with energy, full of life) through thin sleepwear makes your eyes blur, heated and stinging.

Every night your family sleeps dreamless, and you set your jaw and score crescent nail marks in your palms and tell yourself (the sting and slow scabbing is dull and far away and you won’t be able to feel it under your gloves the next morning), desperate with eyes squeezed shut, that you don’t see the omens.

Death does not beckon you just yet. You have at least five years left. The signs are not there, not yet. You won’t die and leave them behind until there’s no more fighting to be done. You can’t, and you won’t—

—Yet you know, because a soldier has to know his own body, that death waits upon your doorstep; you’re twenty years past due and it’s a miracle you still draw breath.

Day by day, week by week, you see the signs of death drawing close, and it hurts more than the living could ever know.

——

One day the four of you are woken at midnight by alarms and Ein is there before you are, clipping on his gear and headset and kicking the confused, sleepy twins out of bed and he very stolidly refuses to look at you, and you’re as grateful as you are burningly, hatefully frustrated because while the twins have never known you as anything but a little clumsy, sometimes disoriented when not synced with Gravitas; Ein’s known you for years as a leader in his prime, fearless and strong with or without Gravitas, reflexes whiplike and tenacious beyond human limits.

This feeling like grit in your lungs and every breath you draw is suddenly fire; it has nothing to do with your failing health and everything to do with the sudden, sick realization that Ein’s known probably as long as you have and you aren’t the only one grateful that you never discuss why the two of you sleep in the same bed, facing apart.

Of course he’d notice when your movement dulled from knifelike to dazed, and of course the perceptive and tactical Ein whom you love understood your pain and kept it to himself, tacit; indelible.

But right now your family and your home is being called to war, and protocol and muscle memory born from the familiarity of routine takes over (Ein too, you casually think offhand) and the acidic feeling settles to background unease as Gravitas’s circuits pulse in time with your heart, the four of you taking to the sky like bright pinpricks; stars against a curtain of night.

——

It’s a skirmish against scouts only, but two new Er Raian mechs wait dazzling against the curve of earth’s horizon, and one of them sits blindingly bright but motionless behind a curved shield of interlocking panels like flower petals, but the other raises diamondlike wires, unearthly dense, to strike; again, and again.

When Ren’s Excelsior is knocked from your formation of four, it collapses further when Ram in Excelsis dives after his unresponsive twin. Ein’s frustrated hiss and the din of battle (your supporters are human, in crafts meant for humans) fade to indistinct background static against the pounding of your pulse. It races in your ears and Gravitas thrums like it’s alive, accepting your torrential emotion and suddenly your sync level crescendos, hitting over double the 46% your body— a first generation cryo— can normally, safely allow.

Death faces you now, its bright cables lashing towards the target —prey; challenge— you present, but you catch them with Gravitas’s limbs united with your own and yank the prismatic shape like a sea creature backwards, ignoring the wire’s bite.

These are your last moments and you’ll spend them like a supernova, protecting the three who still have a future. Gravitas’s thrum pitches up to fever, singing a passion song_— desire to save before fear, a future before five more minutes, adrenaline rising equal with pain—_ high and fast as the living mech resonates with your feeling.

The two mechs clash and it’s blinding, white and hot, and in judgement’s flames you think through the haze that these white-on-white fireworks in your sight must be heaven’s gate unveiling. As each ocular panel falls offline, in the blackness of space you think you can see flashes of another _Kiva's_ future with Ein and the twins-- _contentment before tension, curiosity over fear towards the unknown, watching the sky from below and not within... a wonder before a battleground._

Unreal as it is, if it's an Er Raian gift, you'll receive the alien blessing in thanks for the first time in your short life.

\--200% synced, Gravitas’s systems fail as one with yours and the burnout is swift and severe— you fall from the sky burning like a star, entangled with the enemy mech.

——

The omens were there and with your last couple breaths_ —cold before burning, distant before personal, satisfaction overtaking regret—_ you’re glad you saw them, spectre-like and omnipresent; because if you’d known you still had a future, it would’ve been immeasurably harder to sacrifice it for theirs.

**Author's Note:**

> the er rai are basically the glue of my multiverse LOL.. theyre a race of metal 'tuners' who synchronize with inorganic stuff and imbue it with their will. they can slip through the worlds more or less at will and kinda serve as overseers(?) the vision kiva glimpses at the end is an alternate reality T___T
> 
> re: er raian tuning/"songs", in effect its p close to ar tonelicos song magic, but theres no conlang involved (yet LOL thats a different characters headache) and its just.. emotion. syncing is the human/imitation method of er raian tuning
> 
> tangentially relevant but im in mild consternation @ vld s8 bc i wrote all this like, six years ago, man HAHAHAH


End file.
